Sob stories

Crying shame ... President Bush in Germany. Photograph: Pablo Martinez Monsivais Thanks for all your long songs last week. I'm exceedingly grateful to those readers who introduced me to Lou Reed's Street Hassle. A remarkable song. I can't believe it's taken me this long to hear it. As usual, the Dylans, Caves and Youngs mostly took a back seat to artists who hadn't appeared on a playlist before, but if I'd assembled the list on votes alone, it would have looked like this ...

Nice to have a few new contributors on board. One newcomer observed that "this seems to be a game for nerdy High Fidelity listmania types keen to show off their superior knowledge of the outer reaches of obscurity." I'll take that as a compliment.

Some housekeeping. A few people were curious about how to format their entries. I don't mind how you post your recommendations but if you want to get fancy Linsel has kindly drawn up a formatting guide which I've added to the "Here's how it works" bit. Another couple of people noticed that it's now impossible to post on Monday morning. It turns out there's a new 72-hour limit on all Guardian Unlimited comments and there's nothing I can do about it for the time being so I've had to change the deadline to midnight on Sunday. Apologies. Hopefully we'll be able to change back soon. Finally, there's Fourfoot's intriguing list of whose suggestions have been picked since RR started. This column is a year old on September 15 so that seems like a good time to post his findings.

After all that, this week's theme is crying - or, as Smokey Robinson almost sang, tracks about tears. Any reference to sobbing, crying, weeping or bawling will do. (Hold your fire, Nick Cave fans - we had The Weeping Song a few weeks ago.) Hankies at the ready ...

Deadline for recommendations is midnight Sunday. The archive of previous columns is accessible here, and you can also see an A-Z of every single song that has appeared in the weekly playlists.